On May 19, 2010, at 1:21 AM, Steven Harris wrote: > Hi All > > I'm looking at a Spectralogic T950 tape library instead of another Sun > one to replace our aging Sun L700s > > Has anyone good or bad stories to tell about this? How does the > user-replaceable spares offering work in practice? Are the tetrapaks > robust or do they break easily? > > Is configuration and partitioning simple and straightforward?
It's been a couple of years since I worked with one, but we used one as a remote tape library locked away in a wiring closet across campus. We didn't do any of our own servicing, and I don't think we partitioned the library at all, but the tetrapaks were just fine. We had a period when, as I recall, the library would start to experience intermittent hangs. Shortly before I left that employer, SpectraLogic flew someone out who determined that a good realignment would fix the problem; she was right. (That may have been related to us physically moving the library on our own from one wiring closet to another a couple of hundred yards away. I'm not saying it was, but I have to wonder.) SpectraLogic was moving customers to SuperDAT drives to IBM LTO drives as I moved away from that shop. That's been more than two years; I presume they're stable on their drive choice now. Six months ago, when my current employer was getting ready to get off a particular virtual tape library technology, I would have been thrilled if we'd gone to T950s as our library type. I have good memories of the one I used. (Instead, we simply changed virtual tape library families, but that's for another day.) It's hard to beat the density of a T950. Good luck, Nick
